It may have been unseasonably warm, but there’s a nip in the air on local stages. Among biting dramas, however, some are more toothsome than others. And Bat Boy: The Musical, in its area premiere by SpeakEasy Stage Company, is pretty delicious. Based on a series of hokum perpetrated by the Weekly World News (with which the show has a licensing agreement) about a " bat child " found in a West Virginia cave a decade ago, this campy, singing, sci-fi farce sends up not only tabloid news but the musical theater itself. Winner of the 2001 Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Circle Awards, the hilarious, if intentionally generic, cartoon showpiece makes hay of the capture, civilization, betrayal, and back story of Bat Boy — a creature " half man, half bat " who proves as educable as Eliza Doolittle and as incorrigible as Nature. Moreover, Paul Daigneault’s SpeakEasy production, if sometimes sloppily spilled across the Boston Center for the Arts stage, bleeds talent tartare.

Start with Miguel Cervantes — not the creator of Don Quixote but a 1999 Emerson grad who has generated a publicity flap since donning Bat Boy’s Spock ears and Dracula fangs. He lives up to the hype, turning in a performance as the soulful hybrid WWN-dubbed " Beast! Changeling! Demon chimpanzee! " that’s athletic, animalistic, debonair, and downright sweet. Whether lunging into a full frontal sprawl to bite an adversary or processing through a Lion King number in a loincloth, this guy is game. And though she doesn’t have to hang upside down while singing or harmonize while clinging to a cage, Boston University College of Fine Arts junior Sara Chase proves his equal as Shelley, the local veterinarian’s vacuous, promiscuous daughter, who grows guts and soul when she falls for Bat Boy. Throw in Kerry Dowling as the blithely dusting veterinarian’s wife, who harbors a dark secret and lungs capable of delivering a two-minute high note from a semi-swoon, and Michael Mendiola, admirably understated as the sexually forsaken and vengeful vet, and you’ve got a cast with a solid center. As for the singing and dancing by a quick-change ensemble that includes David Krinitt as the thick Podunk sheriff and Mary Callanan as an upbeat revivalist preacher, it’s good enough to put the likable show across.

Bat Boy: The Musical is the brainchild of Californians Keythe Farley, who has written for Rugrats, and Brian Flemming, a fledgling filmmaker. The Weekly World News saga of the bat child inspired them to parody, and when the two hooked up with composer and lyricist Laurence O’Keefe, whose idea it was to allude to various musical-theater icons in the big numbers, they hit paydirt. The show was a West Coast success before conquering Off Broadway. The SpeakEasy production numbers would be more riotous if they were more precise. Still, whether the cast is echoing Tommy in " Hold Me, Bat Boy " or The Lion King in " Children, Children " (which comes with sha-la-las and a menagerie of costumes), the lampoons are funny and O’Keefe’s tongue-in-cheek lyrics clever. In the best number, the My Fair Lady–inspired " Show You a Thing or Two, " Bat Boy goes from sounding like Cheetah to sounding like Alistair Cooke in a single song. Who’d believe that, by act two, his feelings hurt and his lust for plasma unsated, he’d be prowling the woods in a bloody, tattered T-shirt, dragging half a mutilated cow?

At North Shore Music Theatre, where Dracula: A Chamber Musical is in its American premiere, the title character isn’t " half man, half bat " — he’s half Satan, half Fabio. The show, on the other hand, is half promising notion, half The Phantom of the Opera ripoff. On the plus side, it veers from the standard hoky stage adaptation by John L. Balderston and Hamilton Deane, which turns Dracula into a Noël Coward character, to follow more closely Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, a spooky duel between wholesome love and alluring evil. And Marek Norman’s score is innovatively orchestrated not for thunderous organ and orchestra but for chamber quintet. Unfortunately, with the exception of a couple of songs, the quasi-operatic music is more bombastic than memorable, and the lyrics are banal. Moreover, at North Shore Music Theatre, Ron Bohmer’s lushly coiffed, robust-larynxed Count comes with a hootchy-kootchy posse of scantily clad " Demon Brides " dancing with scarves. Approached by this Vegasy trio of bloodsuckers, you wouldn’t know whether to laugh or die.

This new musical Dracula was apparently a runaway hit at Canada’s Stratford Festival in 1999. The book and lyrics are by the drama critic of the Toronto Star, Richard Ouzounian, who is also a theater practitioner (and served as Hal Prince’s assistant on the Toronto production of The Phantom of the Opera). Composer Norman is a Clio winner (for one of his 1500 commercial jingles!), as well as a musician, performer, producer, and theater composer. The pair take Dracula seriously, making him a smoldering and ominous rather than a campy presence, one given to threats and dramatic, sometimes eerily high vocalizing. And Bohmer does a good job of conveying both the creepy romantic aura and the music. He’s like Michael Crawford with a face (and Sarah Brightman’s tresses — which leaves him a lot better off than Coleen Sexton as Lucy, whose elaborately curled platinum wig makes her look like a less voluptuous Victorian Dolly Parton).

The musical also takes seriously the religiosity of Stoker’s novel — its Dutch vampire expert, Van Helsing, eschews the garlic to thunder Scripture at Dracula. Even Dracula’s musical assertion that " The Blood Is the Life " smacks of the Christian Eucharist. And there are a couple of refreshingly perverse moments: when, early on, Bohmer’s AC/DC Count appears about to bed James Moye’s squeakily heterosexual Jonathan Harker; and later when Dracula seduces Glory Compton’s Mina into climbing onto a bed and tasting blood from his chest. You can almost hear Anne Rice heavy-breathing at the typewriter — until, of course, someone says something particularly wooden or the " brides " appear, dancing in their spangled fake nudity and rendering all things cumbrous and laughable.

The musical seems very derivative, moreover: Dracula’s " Dreams of Darkness, " with its heavily banged night/day imagery, echoes the Phantom’s " The Music of the Night " and " Just One More Night " is a plaintive variation on Les Misérables’ rousing " One Day More. " The most memorable number is for the zoophagous, here relatively sympathetic sanitarium patient, Renfield: the jumpy " The Spider and the Fly, " which Eddie Korbich imbues with loopy, slinky discord (and which Dracula reprises tauntingly while offing his disloyal disciple). There is also a pretty duet, " Not Very Long Ago, " for Korbich’s Renfield and Compton’s Mina, with her affecting soprano.

Despite its minimalist orchestral approach, this Dracula is a heavy-handed affair that repeats its ponderous allurements, among them Dracula’s offer of " everything you’ve dreamed and everything you’ve never dared to dream, " until you expect the duck, rather than the bat, to come down. At North Shore Music Theatre, where in Barry Ivan’s staging Dracula materializes from out of the stage floor, disappears in a puff of green smoke, and wafts predatorily on a turntable, the tale seems meant as both romantic and sinister. (Particularly gruesome, if also funny, is the way in which Moye’s Harker is so Johnny-on-the-spot with his stake-and-hammer set as he aims to drive the wooden spear not through the hearts of slumbering corpses but through up-and-running vampires.) The visual effects include a circle of projection screens that set scenes ranging from the Carpathian Mountains to the English coast and flash disturbing images from red eyes to a wolf’s head. This is a Dracula that means to chill. But between the bodice ripping and the butt wagging, that’s not bloody likely.